unicode(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual unicode(7)
NAME
unicode - universal character set
DESCRIPTION
The international standard ISO/IEC 10646 defines the Universal Character
Set (UCS). UCS contains all characters of all other character set
standards. It also guarantees "round-trip compatibility"; in other
words, conversion tables can be built such that no information is lost
when a string is converted from any other encoding to UCS and back.
UCS contains the characters required to represent practically all known
languages. This includes not only the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew,
Arabic, Armenian, and Georgian scripts, but also Chinese, Japanese and
Korean Han ideographs as well as scripts such as Hiragana, Katakana,
Hangul, Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu,
Kannada, Malayalam, Thai, Lao, Khmer, Bopomofo, Tibetan, Runic, Ethiopic,
Canadian Syllabics, Cherokee, Mongolian, Ogham, Myanmar, Sinhala, Thaana,
Yi, and others. For scripts not yet covered, research on how to best
encode them for computer usage is still going on and they will be added
eventually. This might eventually include not only Hieroglyphs and
various historic Indo-European languages, but even some selected artistic
scripts such as Tengwar, Cirth, and Klingon. UCS also covers a large
number of graphical, typographical, mathematical, and scientific symbols,
including those provided by TeX, Postscript, APL, MS-DOS, MS-Windows,
Macintosh, OCR fonts, as well as many word processing and publishing
systems, and more are being added.
The UCS standard (ISO/IEC 10646) describes a 31-bit character set
architecture consisting of 128 24-bit groups, each divided into 256
16-bit planes made up of 256 8-bit rows with 256 column positions, one
for each character. Part 1 of the standard (ISO/IEC 10646-1) defines the
first 65534 code positions (0x0000 to 0xfffd), which form the BasicMultilingual Plane (BMP), that is plane 0 in group 0. Part 2 of the
standard (ISO/IEC 10646-2) adds characters to group 0 outside the BMP in
several supplementary planes in the range 0x10000 to 0x10ffff. There are
no plans to add characters beyond 0x10ffff to the standard, therefore of
the entire code space, only a small fraction of group 0 will ever be
actually used in the foreseeable future. The BMP contains all characters
found in the commonly used other character sets. The supplemental planes
added by ISO/IEC 10646-2 cover only more exotic characters for special
scientific, dictionary printing, publishing industry, higher-level
protocol and enthusiast needs.
The representation of each UCS character as a 2-byte word is referred to
as the UCS-2 form (only for BMP characters), whereas UCS-4 is the
representation of each character by a 4-byte word. In addition, there
exist two encoding forms UTF-8 for backward compatibility with ASCII
processing software and UTF-16 for the backward-compatible handling of
non-BMP characters up to 0x10ffff by UCS-2 software.
The UCS characters 0x0000 to 0x007f are identical to those of the classic
US-ASCII character set and the characters in the range 0x0000 to 0x00ff
are identical to those in ISO/IEC 8859-1 (Latin-1).
Combining characters
Some code points in UCS have been assigned to combining characters.
These are similar to the nonspacing accent keys on a typewriter. A
combining character just adds an accent to the previous character. The
most important accented characters have codes of their own in UCS;
however, the combining character mechanism allows us to add accents and
other diacritical marks to any character. The combining characters
always follow the character which they modify. For example, the German
character Umlaut-A ("Latin capital letter A with diaeresis") can either
be represented by the precomposed UCS code 0x00c4, or alternatively as
the combination of a normal "Latin capital letter A" followed by a
"combining diaeresis": 0x0041 0x0308.
Combining characters are essential for instance for encoding the Thai
script or for mathematical typesetting and users of the International
Phonetic Alphabet.
Implementation levels
As not all systems are expected to support advanced mechanisms like
combining characters, ISO/IEC 10646-1 specifies the following three
implementation levels of UCS:
Level 1 Combining characters and Hangul Jamo (a variant encoding of the
Korean script, where a Hangul syllable glyph is coded as a
triplet or pair of vowel/consonant codes) are not supported.
Level 2 In addition to level 1, combining characters are now allowed for
some languages where they are essential (e.g., Thai, Lao,
Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, Malayalam).
Level 3 All UCS characters are supported.
The Unicode 3.0 Standard published by the Unicode Consortium contains
exactly the UCS Basic Multilingual Plane at implementation level 3, as
described in ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000. Unicode 3.1 added the supplemental
planes of ISO/IEC 10646-2. The Unicode standard and technical reports
published by the Unicode Consortium provide much additional information
on the semantics and recommended usages of various characters. They
provide guidelines and algorithms for editing, sorting, comparing,
normalizing, converting, and displaying Unicode strings.
Unicode under Linux
Under GNU/Linux, the C type wchar_t is a signed 32-bit integer type. Its
values are always interpreted by the C library as UCS code values (in all
locales), a convention that is signaled by the GNU C library to
applications by defining the constant __STDC_ISO_10646__ as specified in
the ISO C99 standard.
UCS/Unicode can be used just like ASCII in input/output streams, terminal
communication, plaintext files, filenames, and environment variables in
the ASCII compatible UTF-8 multibyte encoding. To signal the use of
UTF-8 as the character encoding to all applications, a suitable locale
has to be selected via environment variables (e.g., "LANG=en_GB.UTF-8").
The nl_langinfo(CODESET) function returns the name of the selected
encoding. Library functions such as wctomb(3) and mbsrtowcs(3) can be
used to transform the internal wchar_t characters and strings into the
system character encoding and back and wcwidth(3) tells how many
positions (0–2) the cursor is advanced by the output of a character.
Private Use Areas (PUA)
In the Basic Multilingual Plane, the range 0xe000 to 0xf8ff will never be
assigned to any characters by the standard and is reserved for private
usage. For the Linux community, this private area has been subdivided
further into the range 0xe000 to 0xefff which can be used individually by
any end-user and the Linux zone in the range 0xf000 to 0xf8ff where
extensions are coordinated among all Linux users. The registry of the
characters assigned to the Linux zone is maintained by LANANA and the
registry itself is Documentation/admin-guide/unicode.rst in the Linux
kernel sources (or Documentation/unicode.txt before Linux 4.10).
Two other planes are reserved for private usage, plane 15 (Supplementary
Private Use Area-A, range 0xf0000 to 0xffffd) and plane 16 (Supplementary
Private Use Area-B, range 0x100000 to 0x10fffd).
Literature
• Information technology — Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set
(UCS) — Part 1: Architecture and Basic Multilingual Plane.
International Standard ISO/IEC 10646-1, International Organization for
Standardization, Geneva, 2000.
This is the official specification of UCS. Available from
⟨http://www.iso.ch/⟩.
• The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0. The Unicode Consortium, Addison-
Wesley, Reading, MA, 2000, ISBN 0-201-61633-5.
• S. Harbison, G. Steele. C: A Reference Manual. Fourth edition,
Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1995, ISBN 0-13-326224-3.
A good reference book about the C programming language. The fourth
edition covers the 1994 Amendment 1 to the ISO C90 standard, which
adds a large number of new C library functions for handling wide and
multibyte character encodings, but it does not yet cover ISO C99,
which improved wide and multibyte character support even further.
• Unicode Technical Reports.
⟨http://www.unicode.org/reports/⟩
• Markus Kuhn: UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for UNIX/Linux.
⟨http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html⟩
• Bruno Haible: Unicode HOWTO.
⟨http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Unicode-HOWTO.html⟩
SEE ALSOlocale(1), setlocale(3), charsets(7), utf-8(7)
Linux man-pages 6.13 2025-01-22 unicode(7)